Running Microsoft Office 2007 on your Mac using Wine / Crossover
Okay, be prepared for some serious geekiness here. If you aren't interested in hacking your computer, compiling from source code, etc., I'm warning you away.
Anyway, here's the thing. I have a macbook pro which I absolutely love. The only pain is that at the office we use Outlook 2007 to connect to our exchange server, and while Apple Mail and entourage are fine for my personal mail, it doesn't really cut it for work. Consequently, when I connect to work for email, I have to fire up a full install of windows running under Parallels desktop in order to run my work stuff. That's no fun.
So, I spent some time in the trying to get Office 2007 to run under Wine and/or Crossover Office. It's not all working yet, but most of it is.
First, the video, to show the end result. All of the apps are running normally (and in fact, pretty fast) under the Crossover 7 installation.
The one thing I haven't worked out yet is what I started trying to get in the first place -- I can't get Outlook to connect to my exchange server. Maybe another day.
Here's the How-To
What you need:
1) Crossover Games 7 (next month they are coming out with Crossover Mac/Linux 7, and I'm sure it will work better under that)
2) I needed a Darwine installation for part of this. I used the pre-built Darwine binaries from http://thisismyinter.net/?cat=7
3) A host of redistributable Microsoft installs. Will detail as I go through them
Steps
1. If you haven't already, install Crossover 7. You can get a trial version from www.codeweavers.com. Download the "Crossover Games" version, not Crossover Mac. This won't work under 6.2.1, the latest regular version
2. Once it's installed, create a new, clean bottle in Crossover. I called mine, appropriately enough, Office2007
3. Download and install the MS XML Parser 3 into your new bottle.
4. Download and install the MS XML Parser 6 into your new bottle (It may be you don't need both. I installed them both, but YMMV)
5. Here's the tricky part. I couldn't get .NET Framework 1.1 to install in my crossover bottle, and MS Office won't load without it. So, first I deleted anything I had in my wine configuration by doing this at the terminal:
cd ~
sudo rm -rf .wine
That cleared any previous Wine configuration. I didn't have anything import in there. If you do, you'll want to find some other option, because this will delete everything in your wine installation.
Now, with my wine directory cleared, I installed Darwine (see above for link). Get the latest build (as of now, 0.9.58)
Then, at the terminal, type "winecfg" to create your new wine directory.
6. Install .NET Framework 1.1 in your new .wine home. The easiest way to do it is to get the "Winetricks.sh" script from here:
http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
I saved the script in my downloads directory, then:
sh ~/Downloads/winetricks.sh
Then click on dotnet11 and it will install.
7. From your ~/.wine/drive_c/windows directory, grab the NET Framework directory and manually copy it to your Crossover bottle
8. At the terminal, type wine regedit. Once in regedit, find the NET framework registry keys and export them. Then, in Crossover, run regedit again and import those keys. You are welcome to try mine, but no guarantees they'll work. Either way, you still have to copy the files over.
9. Get GDIPlus.dll -- you have to have this to run the Office installer. Drop it in your crossover bottle in /drive_c/windows/system32
10. In Crossover, run Winecfg. Select the Libraries tab, add gdiplus as native.
Now starts the fun. I had to copy my entire Office 2007 cd to the crossover bottle ... /drive_c/Office2007
11. Run /drive_c/Office2007/setup.exe in Crossover. If you've done ALL of the above steps correctly, your installation should start. Put in your cd key, hit install, and off it goes!
I had about ten failures before I got all these steps right and working. But finally, I saw this:
Then, oh no. I couldn't get ANYTHING to load except Publisher 2007. Turns out, if you run winecfg again, you'll see that these applications are set to "built-in" in Crossover 7:
outlook.exe
access.exe
excel.exe
winword.exe
Ok. I set all of them to "native, then builtin". Try again and:
So now, they're all running properly, with the one maddening exception: outlook won't connect to my exchange server. If you can get this far, let me know if you have any ideas about that!
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Regards
Regards
However, since I had already watched it copy over the files and add the registry keys, I figured I'd give it a try. MUCH to my surprise, it worked! I only tried installing Word, because that's all I needed. But it works great! It's a little slow to start, but totally useable.
Can't wait for CrossOver 7.0 though. :-)
"Not enough memory to run Microsoft Office Word. Please close other applications and try again." any ideas on how to make it work? Or should I just wait for the new version of Crossover which should hopefully work with Office 2007?
When the manage bottles screen comes up, select your bottle, then the "Control Panel" and double click winecfg.
Winecfg will come up, select the "Libraries" tab and find those programs. Double click them, and change them from "builtin" to "native"
Not that this won't apply to the Crossover 7 product when it comes out -- only the games version.
One of the major advantages of Office for the PC over Mac is its superb handling of foreign languages and spell checking in dozens of languages (as long as you have the appropriate language pack). Word 2007 under CrossOver Games handles Hebrew and Arabic in exactly the same way as Word 2003 under CrossOver 6.2 - the text comes up, but it doesn't organise itself properly on the page and looks terrible. Moreover, when I type in Hebrew only the top two lines of letters work (i.e., the hebrew letters that use the same keys as ZXCVBNM on the bottom line of the keyboard just don't work). In Arabic the bottom two lines don't work. Also, I wasn't able to install any language packs onto Office 2007 in CrossOver Games. The installation starts perfectly but then just pauses in the middle and never finishes. I wonder whether CrossOver Mac 7 fixes these problems? Or maybe someone has a work around for them?
thank you for this wonderful article. I did everything exactly as you described here. The installation ran without any errors. However when I run any of the Office 2007 programs, nothing happens at all. I am on a Germany Leopard installation here. Could this be the cause of trouble? Thanks a lot for suggestions. Udo
@Udo: Hmmm. No idea ... possible same issue as above. One thing you can try (this is how I worked through this process): instead of starting the program from the icon crossover creates, use the crossover "run program" menu, then select the program from /drive_c/program files/microsoft office .... turn on the log file when you do so. This will create a log of what kind of files its trying to access and maybe help you figure out why it won't start.
Interesting to note that I could install the .Net 1.1 Framework without any tricky directly into the Crossover 7 bottle. So I could skip the Darwine step completely. Thanks again for your great work. Udo
An update however .. the beta for Crossover 7 is now out, and has considerably better support for Office 2007 than what I described above.
An update however .. the beta for Crossover 7 is now out, and has considerably better support for Office 2007 than what I described above.
No puedo pasar del paso 4. Si me puedes ayudar,quedaría muy agradecido!.
No puedo pasar del paso 4. Si me puedes ayudar,quedaría muy agradecido!.
Now you can just download the latest version of Crossover Mac beta (I think it's release candidate 4) ... works great with Office and you don't have to do any of the stuff here. Charles
I mean, how can you dispaly the default office borders????
I need word 2007 only for its equation editor. very comfy to type lab reports :) but after all the steps it is not working. can you tell why? I really need it
4.4.1. Outlook can't connect to my Exchange server. CrossOver does not currently support NetBIOS or WINS name resolution. To solve this problem you should add the hostname and IP address of your Exchange server in the /etc/hosts file. For example: 127.0.0.1 localhost 192.168.0.1 mycomputer.myco.com mycomputer 192.168.0.254 mail.myco.com myco_mail_corp 4.4.3. I enter my password for my Exchange server in Outlook and Authentication Fails. It has been found that if your password contains special characters such as @ or ! and you are using pam_smb to authorize then authorization fails. We are working on this bug, for now you need to change you password to not contain such special characters. If you are running in a non-mixed mode network with only Windows 2000 and higher workstations and servers its possible that the domain is only configured for NTLMv2 or higher authentication. At this time CrossOver only supports the older NTLMv1 authentication found in Windows 95 and Windows 98. Contact your network administrator as it is possible enable NTLMv1 compatibility for older clients.
I would just like to get Office up to date and I wonder if I could do that automatically or if have to download and install manually service pack and last updates ...
While at work (connected to corporate LAN/WLAN), I'm able to connect to Exchange. When I am at home and VPN'd to corporate network (with vpnc), I'm unable to connect to Exchange. As far as I can tell, vpnc-script is routing all traffic over the VPN device.
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